From No Man’s Blog (February 13, 2007):

Hot from Beijing this morning, Christopher Hill and all his counterparts at the Six Party Talks are announcing a ‘tentative agreement’ in which North Korea will shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in return for 50,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil a year. According to the agreement, North Korea must shut down the Yongbyon reactor within 60 days and readmit international nuclear inspectors….

From the Washington Post (March 1, 2007):

The United States agreed yesterday to join high-level talks with Iran and Syria on the future of Iraq, an abrupt shift in policy that opens the door to diplomatic dealings the White House had shunned in recent months despite mounting criticism.
[…]
The move was announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in testimony on Capitol Hill, after Iraq said it had invited neighboring states, the United States and other nations to a pair of regional conferences.
[…]
‘I would note that the Iraqi government has invited all of its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to attend both of these regional meetings,’ Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee. ‘We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region.’
[…]
The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.

What the heck is going on?

In a matter of only fifteen days, the Bush administration has done what can only be described as a “complete about face” in it’s policy direction vis-à-vis the governments of Iran and North Korea.  This development begs the question: Is the administration caving in to critics of its hard-line refusal to negotiate with the two Axis of Evil regimes?

I think not.  Instead, we’re seeing the administration take a new tack in its approach to the recalcitrant nuclear aspirants.  I like to think of it as the “put your money where your mouth is” approach to dealing with violators of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  This new approach to dealing with North Korea and Iran might possibly achieve two things:

1. It would temporarily muzzle the advocates of appeasement by taking away the object of their criticism.
2. It would give the administration a way of showing those same detractors just how sincere Iran and North Korea really are at the negotiating table.

Oh, yeah.  And there’s that third (highly remote) possibility that the negotiations just might work….

Richardson at DPRK Studies remarks on the North Korean side of things in a post entitled “The Latest DPRK Nuke Deal: So Far So Good”:

When I suggest things are going well, I don’t mean I’m cautiously optimistic about resolving the nuclear problem through negotiations, but that the edges are already visibly fraying and that North Korea’s rejection – of what would clearly be a generous deal – will deliver some political capital to the Bush administration that can be used on a policy with a chance of success; strangulation.
[…]
I agree with Richard Holloran that North Korea has absolutely no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons, but disagree that Bush will possibly be labeled, “naïve or, worse, deceptive,” since the diplomacy-can-solve-everything crowd has been asking for the administration to, “open a dialogue with Pyongyang” and conclude a deal for years. This is their reality check; it’s North Korea’s fault after all. The unraveling will also, in my opinion, allay claims that the deal would amount to a betrayal of some sort.  (Emphasis added.)

At any rate, this “about face” by the Bush administration seems to be the moral equivalent of throwing the diplomacy-can-solve-everything crowd a bone—a way of saying, “if you want diplomacy, you’ve got it.”  It’ll just be a matter of months until George and Condi report back to the nation that North Korea and Iran have once again refused to abandon their nuclear programs.  As expected….

In the meantime, President Bush can use the interregnum to figure out what we’re really going to do about the problem.  At the same time it’ll let the appeasers bask in a newfound—albeit temporary—sense of self-importance.

And maybe they’ll shut up for a while.

Also, more skepticism at Jules Crittenden and Atlas Shrugs, as well as questions from Cernig at Newshog.

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